On the Darknet, you can buy someone else’s medical record for $1,000

The Darknet is known for being a marketplace for all kinds of illegal things and a blessing for cybercriminals. But at a time where the internet is facing tightened regulations, it also appears as a powerful tool for individual freedom and resistance against oppression.

On July 4, 2017, the Darknet community was taken by surprise. AlphaBay, often describes as the Amazon of the Darknet, a huge underground marketplace where one could buy anything from illegal drugs to counterfeit documents and stolen credit card information, suddenly went dark. Two weeks later, the US Attorney General officially announced that AlphaBay had been taken down in coordinated efforts between a few international law enforcement agencies, including the US Department of Justice and Europol. But it hasn’t stopped illegal traffic on the Darknet. Vendors and buyers just moved to some smaller, more decentralized marketplaces, and business soon picked up again.

Think of it as an iceberg, the visible part being the surface Web, that you access on a daily basis, and the submerged part being the Deep Web, which gathers all the contents that traditional web browsers don’t index

Despite governmental authorities' efforts to regulate it, the Darknet has kept thriving, as freedom and privacy are part of its DNA. When using Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo or another well-known web browser, even though it seems like you’re already being overwhelmed with information, you are actually only seeing a tiny fraction of the whole internet. Think of it as an iceberg, the visible part being the surface Web, that you access on a daily basis, and the submerged part being the Deep Web, which gathers all the contents that traditional web browsers don’t index. Most of those aren’t indexed because they are secured by passwords, protected routes or non-shared spaces. But there are also those (a minority) that aren’t indexed because they require some specific, anonymous online routers, such as Tor, to be accessed — that’s the Darknet. On the Darknet, every user’s identity and location is hidden by design. If the Deep Web is the private part of the internet, the Darknet is its dark twin, the Web’s black mirror.

The Web’s Red-light district

This privacy by design logically makes the Darknet a paradise for all kinds of illegal activities. On the discrete, dodgy marketplaces that prevail on the dark side of the Web, you can buy literally anything. Pirate books, movies and music, of course, but also all sorts of illegal drugs, private information (credit cards and social security numbers, passports, drivers licences), weapons, you name it. Some websites even let you hire a hitman, although it seems like most of these are just scams.

The personal information trading business is particularly lucrative, according to a study conducted by Experian, a consumer credit reporting agency. If a social security number is worth only one dollar, online payment services login information can sell up to $200. Count $2,000 for a US passport. There’s even a whole business built around personal health information. Depending on the level of exhaustivity and accuracy, a medical record can sell up to $1,000, and as 47% of Americans have had their medical record hacked in the past 12 months, according to a 2017 report from the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a cybersecurity think tank, this business is thriving. Health records can be used for different purposes, from stealing a person’s identity and billing them for surgery or a prescription, to opening a new line of credit or even simply blackmailing the owner.

Some websites even let you hire a hitman. (Tom Cruise in Collateral, Michael Mann, 2004)

In this context, it won’t come as a surprise that authorities have been putting up a lot of efforts to have a clearer perspective of what’s happening on the Darknet and crack down on the most illegal activities. Four years before AlphaBay was taken down, Silk Road, the biggest illegal drugs supermarket in the world, that was hosted on the Darknet, was shut down by the FBI, and its creator, Ross Ulbricht, received a life sentence. The DARPA, the research arm of the Pentagon, recently used artificial intelligence to search for illegal activities on the Darknet (primarily human trafficking). Two academics at the Oxford Internet Institute are also currently trying to build a map exposing where the Darknet trade physically happens.

Shine a light

As dark as the Darknet might seem, it actually goes far beyond the illegal activities that it is often reduced to. This private, anonymous twin of the internet is also a powerful tool for freedom and civil liberties. The Darknet is increasingly being used by individuals in countries that ban access to certain parts of the Internet and even arrest people who criticize the government online, such as Turkey, China or Saudi Arabia. But the Darknet is also popular in democracies, where governments are starting to closely monitor online activities. There are also those who are tired of their data being collected and monetized by corporations, or who want their digital activities to stay anonymous and strictly separated from their everyday life.

The Darknet could even help us rethink the Internet to bring back the dream of its founder, Tim Berners-Lee.

In all these cases, the Darknet appears as a safe haven, a place where users can be free both from governments spying and companies advertising models. As Frank Miniter, author of Kill Big Brother, a cyber-thriller that shows how to keep our freedom in this digital age, writes in a Forbes column, it could even help us rethink the Internet to bring back the dream of its founder, Tim Berners-Lee. The Darknet shows us how a decentralized, crowdsourced version of the internet can work and thrive. “When you log on to a dark web site, you quickly notice that there are no pop-up ads following you from website to website. You’ll see websites, even of the criminal variety, that many reports say are very reliable because they have user ratings. If some vendor isn’t reliable, their rating plummets. So the marketplace, illegal as it might be, is regulating itself.

The Darknet isn’t as dark as it first seems.

This system cuts out what many don’t like about retailers on the open Internet. Also, in an online world that is more and more dominated by a few tech firms with once unfathomable power and that are almost all located in one congressional district in California, this new and growing anonymous marketplace dispenses their clout and power. It does this by making people much harder to profile and monetize,” writes Frank Miniter. From this perspective, the Darknet isn’t as dark as it first seems, is it?